CONSPIRACY CLAIM #25

This claim was popularised by the Dutch filmmaker Janet Ossebaard in her video series The Fall of the Cabal and its sequel. Ossebaard began as a researcher of crop circles; the series, first shown in 2019 and uploaded to YouTube in 2020, stitched together many conspiracy theories into one story of a secret “Cabal”, including the Illuminati, ruling the world. The sociologist J. M. Wright has described it as a general introduction to the “QAnon religion” (see Claim #16). Ossebaard died in late 2023; Swedish police found her body in Lund, in southern Sweden, on 22 December 2023. We also looked at her claims about Walt Disney in Claim #09.

The claim here has two steps: first, that the Jesuits secretly took over Freemasonry, and second, that Freemasonry then took over the world’s governments. Neither step survives a look at the history.

The Jesuits and Freemasonry: opposites, not allies

The Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, are a religious order of Catholic priests and brothers. And the Catholic Church has been firmly opposed to Freemasonry for almost three centuries:

• In 1738 Pope Clement XII forbade Catholics to join Masonic lodges, in the bull In eminenti apostolatus. Later popes repeated the ban throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• The 1917 Code of Canon Law punished Masonic membership with excommunication.
• In 1983 the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that Catholics who join Masonic associations “are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion”, a position it restated in November 2023 (see Claim #21 for the exact wording).

Jesuits, as Catholic clergy, are bound by that rule like everyone else. Far from running Freemasonry, the Jesuits produced one of its most famous enemies: the French Jesuit Abbé Augustin Barruel, whose 1797 Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism accused Freemasons and the Illuminati of plotting the French Revolution, and helped launch the very conspiracy theories that Ossebaard was still repeating two centuries later.

For much of that period, the Jesuits were in no position to run anyone else’s organisation. They were expelled from most of Western Europe from 1759, and in 1773 Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus altogether. It was not restored until 1814.

Where did the idea come from?

The notion of a “Jesuit Freemasonry” is old, and its origins are revealing. According to Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, the charge was first made in the eighteenth century and “seems to have originated with the Illuminati”, who used it to belittle rival Masonic systems in comparison with their own. Even Barruel, the Jesuit who spent years attacking Freemasonry, would not accept it: he mocked the idea as “la fable de la Franc-Maçonnerie Jésuitique”, the fable of Jesuit Freemasonry. As Mackey drily remarked: “For once he is right.”

To be complete, some nineteenth-century Masonic writers, Mackey among them, suspected that individual Jesuits may have had a hand in inventing a few of the many short-lived degrees that appeared on the Continent in the 1700s, some of them linked to the exiled Stuart kings. That remains speculation, and even if it were true it would amount to influence over a handful of obscure degrees two hundred and fifty years ago, not control of Freemasonry, then or now.

And then all the world’s governments?

The second step of the claim fails for the same reasons explained in Claim #16 and Claim #24. Freemasonry has no world headquarters and no world leader; every Grand Lodge is independent and sovereign; and regular Freemasonry bans political discussion in the lodge and refuses to take any position on government policy. There is no chain of command through which anyone, Jesuit or otherwise, could steer a single government, let alone all of them.

Conclusion: The Jesuits did not infiltrate Freemasonry, and Freemasonry did not infiltrate the world’s governments. The Catholic Church, Jesuits included, has forbidden Masonic membership since 1738; one of Freemasonry’s fiercest critics was himself a Jesuit; and the “Jesuit Freemasonry” story was dismissed as a fable even in the eighteenth century. Repackaged in a modern video series, it is no more true today.